Toilets in Motion

Some of the more unusual toilets in the world are
those on moving vehicles.
I have pictures of toilets on
trains,
in
subway stations,
on inter-city
buses,
and on board
ships,
and
airplanes.
I even have pictures of toilets on
spacecraft,
as seen in museums.
Do you know why ships' toilets are called
heads?
Do you know what a
drop chute toilet is?
Do you know
how to go to the bathroom in space?
Find out!
Click on any of the pictures or links to be taken to
pages with many more pictures showing that mode of
toilet transportation in detail.

Trains

High-end trains have high-end toilets.
This is a toilet on board the
Belgian Thalys train
running at 300 kilometers per hour between
Brussels and Paris.

Of course, not all train toilets are nice...

This is the worst train toilet I have ever
encountered, on a regional
Italian train
out of Firenze.

It looks ordinary — a simple drop
straight onto the track.
But...

The problem is that the drain pipe is directional.
It is supposed to draw air down the pipe like a
chimney, pulling waste and air down the toilet,
out of the compartment and onto the tracks.

The problem was that this one was forcing air
up the pipe, with an effect that you can
probably imagine but might prefer not to.

Full speed operation forced a very brisk air flow up
the pipe.
The result was a high-speed urine fountain.
Closing the seat and lid just slightly changed the
direction of flow — rather than spraying straight
up, it now came out horizontally about knee high.
The high air speed made for very fine droplets that
more easily stayed airborne.

By the time we got into the next city, the interior
of the toilet compartment had been coated in a fine
mist of urine.
It was a fairly long trip, people had had to use it
and
recharge the fountain.

Public toilets are not generally available, but some
stations have them if you know where to look.

Buses

Greyhound buses
in the U.S. have on-board toilets.
They have a holding tank with the traditional
blue juice.
I was surprised to see that the design is just a
straight drop down a wide shaft into the tank.
I would think that the toilet could get awfully
smelly on a long hot trip.
There is a small air vent directly to the exterior
just to the right of your head if you were
sitting on the seat.

The toilet compartment occupies the right half of
what would be a full-width rear bench seat and
what would be the pair of seats just in front of
that on the right side of the aisle.

Smaller vessels also have heads, but they are
smaller and the flushing mechanism may be rather
different.
Here you see one
of the heads and its manual flushing mechanism on board
a rented Crusader
canal boat
in France.

Submarines

During the last month of World War II,
a German U-boat was lost due to problems
with its toilet.
The captain of the U-1206 wanted to
use the toilet, and did so without the assistance of
one of the on-board engineers qualified in the
operation of that particular toilet.
The resulting mishap threatened to poison the crew
with chlorine gas and forced the submarine to surface
during the daytime near the coast of Scotland.

It was quickly spotted by a British aircraft which
attacked the sub and damaged it badly enough that
it was unable to safely dive.

The captain scuttled the submarine, just 10 days into
the only real combat patrol for both the submarine
and its captain, and just over two weeks before
Hitler's suicide leading to
Germany's surrender 8 days later.

Cross-section diagrams of a German Type VIIc U-boat.

Aircraft

Toilets on airplanes
have a distinctive design, but they're all pretty
similar to each other.
This is one of the toilets along
the fuselage centerline on a
KLM Boeing 747
flying from Amsterdam to Chicago.

Not only are
airplane toilets
very similar across several
aircraft models, and identical from one airline to the
next, they have been very similar for a long time.

The DC-7 was the last major piston-engined transport made
by Douglas, built from 1953 to 1958.
Back in 1953, American Airlines charged $302 for a
round-trip ticket — New York to Los Angeles and return.

Spacecraft

Remember that these pages document toilets
that I have seen.
While I haven't gone into space, I have been to
aerospace museums.
And so I have some pictures of
space toilets
and related equipment.
See the dedicated spacecraft toilet page
for several answers to the question,
"How to you go to the bathroom in space?"

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.